The Fates Will Find Their Way by Hannah Pittard is one of the more beautiful books I have read in my lifetime. I felt like I was watching the passing of time and living my life secretly along with the boys who miss Nora. At first as the reader I wanted to know what did happen to Nora, but the feeling passes and you are waiting with bated breath for the next story the boys concoct of her disappearance and later the stories they tell about themselves.

Pittard hits the nail on the head of life in suburbia. The boys and girls and eventually men and women do what their parents did before them. They seem mildly apathetic, due to the loss of Nora and the what if's plaguing their lives. I think I was most sensitive to Danny whose mother killed herself because she had cancer, and whose father was a raging alcoholic. The boys while kind to him never truly respected him or saw him as a peer growing up. Trey I wondered a lot about in the beginning of the book, the road he took for himself seemed genuine.

I just can't say enough about this book. It is a unique opportunity into the minds of others. There is laughter, tears, and heartbreak and you will be engrossed on every page turn.

FTC Disclosure: I received this title from the lovely Mark at Harper Collins for the purpose of review.( )

I love when I pick up a book and just fall right into it. I was a little wary when I picked up The Fates Will Find Their Way because the Goodreads rating is only so-so, and I try not to read anything that has less than a 3.5 star rating. But this one, with its little 3.18, was fantastic.

If you’re a fan of The Lovely Bones and The Virgin Suicides, then you will love this book. The basic premise is this:

At 17, a well-like girl named Nora Lindell went missing. Over the next couple of decades, a group of boys in her class concoct various stories about what may have happened to her. In some, she’s married and happy, and in others she’s a long-time dead. But in all of them, the details are vivid and the longing palpable. Even as they grow up, get married, and have kids, the boys from Nora’s childhood can’t seem to let her go.

The Fates Will Find Their Way is narrated by a group of neighborhood boys and tells of their fascination of a fellow neighbor and classmate, Nora Lindell, who goes missing when she is 16 years old. It follows the boys from high school into adulthood through their 20s, 30s, 50s, all the while continuing their obsession of Nora. The majority of the book is the boys' speculation of what happened to her and hypothesizes about her life in the off-chance she is alive.

I read many great reviews on this book; I wonder what they saw in it that I didn't. Needless to say, I did not like this book. It was a huge waste of time and I only finished it to find out what happened to Nora, which ****SPOILER ALERT**** never happens! You never find out what happened to her! The book is short enough that you can finish it in a few hours, but since I was so disinterested in it it took me two weeks. And there wasn't even a payoff in the end for finishing it! ARGH! The story jumps from past to present to past, from fiction to truth to fiction, in no particular order. The transitions are rough and disjointed and there is no closure in the end. You don't even find out much about the boys' lives other they are either married and have children or are single; the whole focus of the story is their theories of Nora's supposed life. Boring. One thing I am thankful for is that the book wasn't longer, so I didn't waste more of my time reading it.

In this, Ms. Pittard’s debut is less novel than a chorus monologue: There’s no real plot, and the characters don’t develop (or only in superficial ways - the boys start families, buy homes, but their thoughts, attitudes and interactions remain adolescent). Instead, the book is a patchwork of discontinuous recollections, gossip and imaginings about Nora, the boys, their friends and neighbors.

Where The Virgin Suicides had a good old gothic wallow in its adolescent turmoil, The Fates Will Find Their Way is more meditative. It leaps back and forth in time, looking forward to the boys' adulthood and back again, nostalgically, as they grow up. It's a coming-of-age story in which everyone is all ages, all the time.

By turns, "Fates" is a mystery and a coming of age story, chock-full of sexual innuendo and misconduct that includes rape and possible murder. Although there is a lot of unseemly action in "Fates," there is very little dialogue. Pittard prefers to let her narrators ruminate, allowing her readers to form their own conclusions about what may have happened and why.

As deeply felt as “The Fates Will Find Their Way” might be, it only circles around a plot, and so its collective voice eventually loses strength. The more characters are peeled away from the group, the less powerful the original collective becomes.

At other times, the novel's voice seems weirdly incorporeal, lacking the visceral sense of what it's like to inhabit a breathing, sweating, working male body. These "we boys" who grow up to become "we men" are an oddly sensitive, feminine ideal of male consciousness, filled with quiet sorrow for the transgressions of men.

If there’s a quibble to be had, it’s that the title, as well as the Virgil epigraph from which it’s taken, tries to make the novel seem slightly more grandiose than it really is. It’s unnecessary. Smallness can be a virtue, and The Fates Will Find Their Way is itself excellent proof.

Wikipedia in English

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Book description

Sixteen-year-old Nora Lindell is missing. And the neighborhood boys she's left behind are caught forever in the heady current of her absence.

As the days and years pile up, the mystery of her disappearance grows kaleidoscopically. A collection of rumors, divergent suspicions, and tantalizing what-ifs, Nora Lindell's story is a shadowy projection of teenage lust, friendship, reverence, and regret, captured magically in the disembodied plural voice of the boys who still long for her.

Told in haunting, percussive prose, Hannah Pittard's beautifully crafted novel tracks the emotional progress of the sister Nora left behind, the other families in their leafy suburban enclave, and the individual fates of the boys in her thrall. Far more eager to imagine Nora's fate than to scrutinize their own, the boys sleepwalk into an adulthood of jobs, marriages, families, homes, and daughters of their own, all the while pining for a girl — and a life — that no longer exists, except in the imagination.

A masterful literary debut that shines a light into the dream-filled space between childhood and all that follows, The Fates Will Find Their Way is a story about the stories we tell ourselves — of who we once were and may someday become.

Sixteen-year-old Nora Lindell is missing. And the neighborhood boys she's left behind are caught forever in the heady current of her absence.

As the days and years pile up, the mystery of her disappearance grows kaleidoscopically. A collection of rumors, divergent suspicions, and tantalizing what-ifs, Nora Lindell's story is a shadowy projection of teenage lust, friendship, reverence, and regret, captured magically in the disembodied plural voice of the boys who still long for her.

Told in haunting, percussive prose, Hannah Pittard's beautifully crafted novel tracks the emotional progress of the sister Nora left behind, the other families in their leafy suburban enclave, and the individual fates of the boys in her thrall. Far more eager to imagine Nora's fate than to scrutinize their own, the boys sleepwalk into an adulthood of jobs, marriages, families, homes, and daughters of their own, all the while pining for a girl–and a life–that no longer exists, except in the imagination.

A masterful literary debut that shines a light into the dream-filled space between childhood and all that follows, The Fates Will Find Their Way is a story about the stories we tell ourselves–of who we once were and may someday become.

Nora went missing on Halloween. Far more eager to imagine Nora's fate than to scrutinize their own, the neighborhood boys sleepwalk into an adulthood of jobs, marriages, families, homes, and daughters of their own, all the while pining for a girl-- and a life-- that no longer exists, except in the imagination.… (more)